I learnt cursive in my elementary school, but I didn't really use it. Having said that, I didn't really take notes in elementary school, and in middle school not all the time.

So by the time I was in high school and I started taking notes, my handwriting wasn't up to par. Well, my handwriting was different than others. I wrote my letters with different stroke rules, which made it look quite different when I wrote fast - illegible to many people. (I got used to reading my own writing. Part of the illegibility was the fact that I had many different ways of writing combinations of letters, I guess like ligatures, that made it difficult for the average person to see the letters.)

Then after a while I started getting back and trying to write in normal English cursive. While I'm definitely much slower this way, it has much neater writing, and I like it.

I guess I'm interested in these kind of ligatures because of my old handwriting. I don't want to revert to it; but I found the way I wrote letters differently depending on the letters around it, and the way I joint letters together interesting. If I ever make a conscript, I'd definitely make it like my old handwriting in that regard, but I'll of course make it more ergonomic and neater.

So I guess nobody knows of any other such cursive ligatures? Other than the famous German ß I can't think of any.

I was taught cursive in elementary school in 1998, so it probably is lingering somewhere. I still use it in two forms, when I'm writing neatly on a classroom whiteboard (or I write in all caps), or when I'm taking notes, and the writing is indecipherable chicken scratch.

In my grade school we were required to write in cursive. We started out with printing, moved to D'Nealian and finished it with cursive by the 3rd or 4th grade. I was really good, but for some reason in High School I just stopped using it. Now I can't write in cursive to save my life. Its a shame really. I tried to reteach it to myself a couple years back, but just gave up because I can print fairly quick and I like the look of my printing anyway.

Heh, this takes me back. When I was in elementary school, we studied a kind of crummy “simplified” longhand, where you used a kit of a few standard strokes to (semi-legibly) form each of the letters. All I can remember is it was sometime between grades 1 and 3, which would put it circa 1985. (This was in a suburb of Vancouver, Canada.) I seldom used it — even then, a lot of my assignments were typed on the family Commodore 64, and I usually used printed letters when doing stuff by hand. I never liked using longhand as a child and people had trouble reading it when I did — hardly surprising, lack of practice will do that.

Fast forward 20-odd years, and I have made a real effort to improve the form of my printed letters, which are now MUCH nicer to look at than many others’ that I know of, at least when I’m not in a hurry. :¬) I wish I could show you folks the made-up alphabet I invented for use with English — I think you here call that a conscript, yes? — and the handwritten forms I invented for it. It was a fun exercise and really made me rethink a lot of the letterforms.

One odd thing I’ve noticed when I’m printing my letters rather than writing them longhand is that I’ll switch back and forth, often within a single word, between normally cased and small-caps lettering. This makes my tax return look more than a little eccentric… *sheepish look*